Earlier this month at the Open Book festival in Cape Town, the winners of the 7th annual Maskew Miller Longman Literature Awards were announced. While last year’s awards focused on youth dramas, this year’s competition was open to entries of unpublished youth novels in any of South Africa’s official languages.

Warren Kliphuis, sales director at Maskew Miller Longman, revealed at the ceremony held at Cape Town Central Library that they had received a total of 132 entries from 110 entrants.

Finuala Dowling, the guest speaker at the event, discussed the challenges of writing in South Africa. She said that writers have to trust that the “South African-ness” of their story will shine through without having every atrocity of apartheid happen to their characters. “There are so many South African titles with the word ‘Country’ in them – Country of My Skull, Cry the Beloved Country,” Dowling pointed out, but she said that writers’ focus should actually shift to developing characters: “We need Character of My Skull, Cry the Beloved Character“.

Even more difficult than writing a South African novel, said Dowling, is writing a South African youth novel, “because young people won’t pretend to like a book the way some adults do”. For this reason, she heartily congratulated the winners of this year’s Maskew Miller Longman Literature Awards.